


dear queen of hearts

by miraimisu



Category: Gintama
Genre: Battling, Consoling, F/M, Kagura Loses Control of Her Instincts and Nearly Goes Apeshit, Kagura and her Issues with Loneliness, Mentions of Kamui vs Kagura in Rakuyou, Okita is a bit soft for her shh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23157418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraimisu/pseuds/miraimisu
Summary: He's been left behind plenty of times. Okita knows what abandonment is like. He's had to watch the backs of everyone leaving him since he was very little.He knows what loneliness can do to a person.He doesn't want any of it to touch her.
Relationships: Kagura/Okita Sougo
Comments: 12
Kudos: 147





	dear queen of hearts

After years of living in the same place, with the same people and with the same traditions, Okita considers himself to be one of those boring people that do the same things over and over, with the exception that life in Edo simply _never_ gets boring.

There's always a spark keeping the city alive that he can't deny: sometimes, there's a robber dressed in a bear onesie trying to rob a bank; sometimes, there's a secret candy-dealing mafia hiding in the shadows that they have to scout out; sometimes, he has to be a bodyguard for the Princess, somebody he has come to consider a resemblant of a sister; and, sometimes, the Yorozuya are somehow involved in all these incidents.

Those times are his excellent favorite, not because they're easy to deal with, but because it's always fun to go head to head with people he knows won't cause any major trouble– except for a certain redhead with a tendency to destroy anything around him to spite his existence.

That's always fun, having somebody torture him the same way he tortures her.

It's nice, it's fun, and he would be _nowhere_ without sarcasm.

So, as always, Okita waits at the park for something to happen. He wonders if the Yorozuya will rush down the road in a carriage with vintage dresses, aiming a gun at him. He wonders if Katsura will slide down the avenue with his terrorist crew behind him. Maybe, out of the ordinary as it may seem, Kamui will jump down from the sky and try to behead him.

That would be nice.

Instead, what he gets is the familiar feeling of a metallic point pressed against the back of his neck.

"I could kill you if I wanted, uh-huh."

Okita doesn't resist the urge to roll his eyes. "Throwing you to jail for murder would be much easier than throwing you in for being an illegal immigrant, so please do."

"I'm not an illegal immigrant and nobody will know it was me. The perfect crime." Okita can hear the shit-eating grin in her voice, for some reason. He doesn't like how perceptive of that detail he is. "Nobody will care a chihuahua like you is bleeding on the floor."

She's especially feisty today. That should be fun.

However, when Okita turns around to look at her over his shoulder, a quip ready at the tip of his tongue, all eloquence leaves him. Kagura is smiling, she looks as smug and dumb as ever. Years have done favors to her in terms of her physical appearance (it no longer looks like he's fighting a child), but she's still the same brat he's come to know and secretly be fond of.

But there's a small dent to her smile that puts him off, somehow. There's one less spark in her eyes and her cheeks aren't as full as usual.

Okita arches an eyebrow. "What's up?"

"Luckily your ass when I hang you from a tree, uh-huh."

"China–"

Kagura fires her umbrella at him and the bullet brushes with the lapel of his jacket, causing Okita to spring right out of her reach with a hand on the hilt of his sword. "What the hell is wrong with you!? You could have killed me!"

"And that's what I said I would do!" Kagura retorts back, skipping over the bench with her umbrella hanging low. There's a teasing crook to her hollow smile that looks _almost_ like her. "Stop being a coward! Did you leave your balls at home today? Gin-chan always tells me men your age are supposed to fight like men do, uh-huh."

Okita hesitates for a second. It's not like him to be so fidgety about death and harm, but something in her expression had led him to believe she wouldn't be _this_ violent. She doesn't look like herself today, even if she acts as irritatingly as ever.

Kagura might be good at hiding whatever she's thinking now, and maybe kicking his ass is her way of forgetting about it.

"You really want to get on my nerves today, don't you?" Okita takes his sword out and holds it to the sun. "I was having a fine day before you came, China."

Kagura swings her umbrella across her shoulders, staring at him defiantly. "It's the survival of the biggest, Chihuahua. Corrupt policemen like you don't survive."

"That's _not_ how the saying goes."

A vein pops on her forehead as she points her umbrella at him again. "Just fight me already! I don't have time for your yipping!"

Fighting with Kagura is one of the few things in life that give him genuine joy and excitement. Okita has many things to be thankful for and others that satisfy his ache for stability and comfort, but Kagura provides that small tilt to the balance that he needs. His heart races, his jaw tenses, and his body feels _alive_.

Very few people have ever given him this unique feeling, and both of them had been Yatos. Maybe people are right when they call him a monster.

Kagura delivers a precise kick to his chest that should have sent him to the ground, but it instead only pushes him a few inches backward and he can fend her off easily after that. Okita knows how Kagura moves fully well, so he knows where he should have ended and how things would have followed if he had ended on the floor: she would have pointed her umbrella at his forehead, he would maybe grab her ankle and the fight would continue.

She's a bit sloppy today, which is unheard of in a Yato. It's almost as if–

"Why are you holding back?" asks Okita, releasing a pant. Kagura, even when holding back, was one hell of a fighter. "You're too slow."

Kagura releases an uncanny frown, dashing towards him and succeeding at kicking him down this time. He lands on the ground with more force than usual, his head hurts like _hell_ when he hits the hard soil, and when he looks up again, Kagura is looking at him with a very odd look in her eyes.

The sole of her boot pushes the tip of his sword down. "Who's too slow now?"

It feels like he's hit a nerve. Something is wrong.

"China–"

Kagura grabs her umbrella and allows him to flee. Okita quickly gets to his feet before she starts firing bullets at him– which is weird for her to do in a public place. He knows she doesn't like hurting innocent people, so it's odd for her to fire bullets when she could hurt some stray pedestrian naïve enough to be ambling around the mostly empty park.

There's a sharp focus in her eyes and a silence to her words that make suspicion and dread pool at the pit of his stomach. He knows Kagura has grown strong while she was off in space, but this–

Before she can deliver a kick to his head with her umbrella, Kagura stops her with his blade. "What's gotten into you? Are you on your period or something?"

Whatever that's in her eyes grows into a black hole that shadows her whole expression. Okita has never seen Kagura fight with murderous intent. It's the closest he's seen her to Kamui, her brother.

"What's wrong?" Okita asks with as much tact as he can.

"Nothing you need to know," Kagura answers back, narrowing her eyes. A smirk graces her features, but it's nothing like her. "What's wrong? Aren't we here to _fight_?"

And when she pounces on him, she does it with a wanton that is, again _nothing_ like her. It's not like her to talk with such _seriousness_ , and it's not like her to aim at him as though she's a beast on the hunt and like the only thing that will appease her is to see him bleed until he's _dead_.

This intensity is closer to what Kamui had once been and not the Kagura he knows.

Kagura jumps up with a gracious flip and slams his body on the ground. Cracks appear under him and she's got another fist aimed at him when Okita pushes his blade between him and her, hoping that seeing her hand bleeding will snap her out of it–

Kagura firmly grabs the blade of his sword and pushes her hand against his throat. Blood drips from her palm and down her arm, her eyes are a little wider, and–

"What are you doing?" asks Kagura in a very quiet voice. "Making a fair lady bleed like this isn't what gentlemen do, uh-huh."

"I'm not a gentleman and you're anything but a fair lady today, China." Her hand is still squeezing the sharp edge of his blade. Okita frowns. "You're hurting yourself, idiot. And you're gonna choke me."

Kagura blinks in recognition and looks at her palm as though her firm grip is only an accident. She also seems to realize she's grabbing his throat now, for her grip falters and Kagura looks at her hands with a mix of horror and confusion.

Much to his relief and bewilderment, she crawls away from him, a few good feet. Kagura stares into her hands with trembling eyes and a lost gaze that Okita instantly _hates_ on her. It's nothing like China to look as small as she actually is– she's always bigger, broader, defying him and the universe around her like the natural nuisance she was born to be.

Okita looks at the crimson on his blade. "What's wrong, China?"

"No–"

" _China_ , you might fool anybody, but you're not gonna fool me." Her eyes widen, eyebrows knit an inch. "You can tell me what's wrong and get it off your chest or I can just go and let you cry it off, or whatever it is you wanna do. Your choice."

Okita wishes he had more tact for situations like these. Kagura looks upset beyond belief, more at herself than anything. He's never seen her in such a genuine light before.

He's unsure of what could come out of this.

When she says nothing, he tries to come close to her, but she takes another step back. "Don't come any closer," she orders in a firm voice. "It's not safe, uh-huh."

"Safe?"

Kagura looks at him intently as though he's asking about something he does not want to know about.

Then, she sighs. "It's a long story."

"Patrol duty is long too," he replies, stubbornly sitting down to her level. She's still looking at her hands in foreign disappointment. "So you can start spilling before you bleed to death from that hand alone."

Okita is acutely aware that she had gripped the sword hard enough for all her fingers to be chopped off. It's a miracle she's not in a hospital. It makes him remember that as much as both relish in violence and chaos, she's not like him. They're not made of the same pieces.

Kagura is a creature born from the sky and he was born from the ground. The fact that they have met is probably a disgrace to whoever is watching.

"Gin-chan, Shin-chan, and I went on a mission last night. It got very ugly very quickly." Her voice is distraught, lost in a troubling memory. "I don't remember much of it, but Gin-chan told me that things went wrong and that I… lost control of myself."

Okita watches, from the distance, how she's caressing the seams of the cuts on her hands. "What do you mean?"

"I lost control of my Yato blood, uh-huh," Kagura says everything very slowly, like every word is a jab to her heart and it's destroying her to admit it to herself– it might as well be the first time she's had to confront this situation. "If Gin-chan hadn't stopped me, I would have killed them, too. I killed _everyone_ in that room."

He swallows a very gentle, thick gulp at the thought. He's heard stories of what horrific, beastly faces Kamui has pulled when losing control of himself, and thinking of that same image but on Kagura is _chilling_.

(Because Kagura is gentler, smaller, pure in a way that escapes his imagination, even when she can bathe on blood and spit words dirtier than those of a pig.)

Kagura interprets his silence as a license to continue. "I don't remember anything, uh-huh. I know we got to a shed with very ugly baldies and drugs, and then I blacked out." She continues looking at her hands. "When I came to Edo, I promised myself I wouldn't lose control of myself and that I would grow stronger without that. I don't want to become what my brother became."

Her shoulders tremble _once_ and that's all Okita needs to approach her, sitting at a reasonable distance from her– not close, but still respectable. "China, you were trying to protect them. It's not your fault."

"If I couldn't protect them without using my Yato blood, that means I'm not strong enough." Her head is downcast, but he catches sight of her biting her bottom lip– maybe in frustration, maybe to stave off tears. "I should be stronger than this. I spent years in space, looking for ways to bring Sadaharu back. I have fought my brother more times than I should have, and still…"

And still, she's not strong enough to protect who Okita believes she sees as her family.

And still, she feels weak and useless, even if she's _not_ useless and she's stronger than anyone he knows.

Okita has been there in the past. But he stays quiet.

"Gin-chan and Shin-chan are scared of me."

It's that confession that catches him off-guard. When he looks down at her hands, he finds them to be completely healed, and all that remains is drying blood and regret.

"I woke up today and they were talking about me. They think something was wrong with me last night. Shin-chan has seen me lose control before, but it must have been terrifying if he's scared of me now." Kagura curls her fingers into fists. "I don't want them to be scared of me. I don't want to be alone again."

He pictures a smaller Kagura with a smaller umbrella and smaller hands waiting for her family to come back home in a rainy, lonely town made of nothing but dread and despair.

He pictures a smaller Kagura growing to be scared of herself because of a brother that gave it all up just to be strong.

He pictures Kagura having to fight her own family as they give in to who they truly are, the beasts they were tamed to be, as she tries to not give in to the terrifying monster she must think she is, deep inside.

It's scary to think she might be right. Okita doesn't want to think that loneliness and desperation can turn her into whatever she had been last night.

He's been left behind plenty of times. Okita knows what abandonment is like. He's had to watch the backs of everyone leaving him since he was very little.

He knows what loneliness can do to a person.

He doesn't want any of it to touch her.

"They won't leave you, China." He says in a low voice. "They've chased off monsters much worse than you. Rejecting your blood will only make it pump stronger."

"I don't want to hurt the people I care about, uh-huh," Kagura says, scared, forlorn. "I don't want to be _that_."

It hits him that Kagura had been holding back to not hurt him beyond repair and that she had probably caught herself right before crossing the line. It hits him that she had probably let go of her inhibitions and that he had been lucky enough to snap her out of whatever she was about to become.

If the fight they had earlier had been a small slice of what hell she could give, she's more similar to Kamui than he had bargained for.

Kagura abruptly shakes her head and gets up from the ground, cleaning her hands on her red ao dai. Okita watches her from the ground. "Don't think I will hold back next time we meet, uh-huh. I will come back stronger than ever, you hear me? I just need to sleep this off and–"

"China."

When Kagura turns to him again, she finds him to be standing, hands in his pockets.

"Shoot me."

She blinks at him as though he just slapped her. "What?"

"I said shoot me," Okita says in his classic deadpan, staring intently into her wide, blue eyes. "Before we started fighting, you said you could kill me if you wanted, right? I'm giving you the opportunity to do it now."

"Did you lose your mind?" Kagura asks, shoulders squared. Part of him wonders if she knows of his intentions. "What is this about? I won't accept an easy win, uh-huh. If I kill you, I will do it with more style and hang you up like corrupt bastards deserve."

"It's not like you to not take advantage of an open spot, China."

"And it's not like you to give yourself in. I know you're a sadist, but I don't want to dirty my umbrella with your gross blood."

"So," Okita clicks his tongue, "you're a coward."

That's all it takes for Kagura to lift her umbrella and aim it at him in defiance. "I'm going to shoot so many bullets you're gonna die of pleasure, sadist."

At first, Okita thinks she _might_ shoot him. She holds the heavy umbrella with such grace and virtue it's like she's making mere calculations of where it'll hurt him the worst– but, upon minutes of silence, he finds her eyes to be narrowed in thought, that her irises are confused and lost and that her grip on her umbrella is shaky.

She doesn't want to shoot him.

"What's up, China?" Okita takes a step closer. "Look, I'm closer now. You can aim wherever you want now."

Kagura still doesn't shoot him. Her finger hovers over the trigger, but she doesn't take it any further. She seems frustrated, lost, jaw squared and eyes shaky in hesitation.

Okita sighs, takes another step and lowers her umbrella with one hand before standing right before her and pushing her head to his chest. His other hand clutches his phone tight, feeling the buzz of Hijikata's frantic calls for him.

"See? You're not going to kill anyone, idiot. It's not like you to go around murdering people. I know you're not that kind of person." He watches Kagura's arms fall slack. She doesn't pull away. "Calm down, okay? You're fine, China. You're fine."

It's as though those words are what hit the switch, for before he knows it, he watches her begin to tremble, quiet sobs coming from her. Her head is bowed down to where he can't see her cry, forehead against his chest.

"I know you, China," Okita says, knowing she can't fill the space between them now. "I know you're not a killer. You might be an idiot and an airhead, but you're _not_ a killer. I trust you."

Kagura says something akin to "Stupid sadist," as she cries into his chest, grabbing the sides of his jackets so tight she might tear it apart, but her umbrella soon clatters on the ground and he hopes Hijikata won't mind him being late to the Shinsengumi tonight.

He has something important to take care of now.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I've been a shipper for a while and I only sat down to write for them now VGJHFJDKLSÑ literally sat my ass down for an hour or two and wrote this 
> 
> is Kagura a little OOC yes she is but I just needed her to vent because why not this fic is so pointless LMAO it was longer than it needed to be buT
> 
> anyway bye /penguin walks away


End file.
